Who fill'd with unexhausted fire,
May boldly strike the sounding lyre,
May rise above the rhyming throng,
And with some new, unequallid song,
()’er all our list'ning passions reign,
O’erwhelm our souls with joy and pain ;
With terror shake, with pity move,
Rouze with revenge, or melt with love.
O deign t'attend his evening walk,
With him in groves and grottos talk:
Teach him to scorn with frigid art
Feebly to touch th' unraptur'd heart;.
Like light'ning, lets his mighty verse
The bofom's inmost foldings pierce :
With native beauties win applause,
Beyond cold critics' studied laws :
O let each Muse's fame increases.
O bid Britannia riyal Greece!
L'ALLEGRO
(MILTON.] HEN
Of Cerberus, and blackest midnight born, , In Stygian cave forlorn. 'Mong ít horrid shapes, and shrieks, and fights unholy, Find out some uncouth cells
Where brooding darkness spreads his jealous wings,
And the night raven fings;
There under ebon shades, and low-brow'd rocks,
As ragged as thy, locks,
In dark Cimmerian desart ever dwell.
But come thou goddess fair and free,
In heav'n yclep'd Euphrofyne,
And by men heart-easing Mirth,
Whom lovely Venus at a birth,
With two fifter Graces more
To ivy-crowned Bacchus bore;
Or whether (as some sages fing)
The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
Zephyr with Aurora playing,
As he met her-once à maying,
There on beds of violets blue,
And fresh-blown roses, wash?d in dew,
Fill'd her with thee a daughter fair,
So bucklome, blithe, and debonair.
Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee
Jeft and youthful jollity,
Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods, and becks, and wreathed (miles,
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple fleek;
Sport that wrinkled care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides,
Come, and trip it as you go
On the light fantastic toe;
And in thy right hand lead with thee
The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty:
And if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew,
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free:
To hear the Jarķ begin his flight,
And finging Startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise ;
Then to come in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good-morrow,
Through the sweet briar, or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine :
While the cock with lively din
Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
And to the stack, or the barn door,
Stoutly ftruts his dames before :
Oft list'ning how the hounds and horn
Chearly rouse the numb'ring morn,
From the side of some hóar hill,
Through the high wood echoing fhrill:
Some time walking not unseen
By hedge-row elms, on hillocks green,
Right against the eastern gate,
.
Where the great fun begins his state,
Rob’d in flames, and amber light,
The clouds in thousand liveries dight:
While the plow-man near at hand,
Whiftles p'er the furrow'd land,
And the milkmaid fingeth blithe,
abe And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.
Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures,'
Whilst the landskip round it measures;
Ruflet lawns, and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do itray;
Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often reft;
Meadows trim with daisies pied;
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide :
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosom'd high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The Cynofure of neighbouring eyes.
Hard by a cottage-chimney smokes,
From betwixt two aged oaks,
Where Corydon and Thrysis met,
Are at their favoury dinner set
Of herbs, and other country mesfes,
Which the neat-handed Phyllis dreffes j
And then in haste her bower the leaves,
With Theftylis to bind his fheaves ;
Or, if the earlier season lead,
To the tann'd haycock in the mead.
Sometimes with secure delight
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks found
To many a youth, and many a maid,
Dancing in the chequer'd shade;
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday,
Till the live-long day-light fail;
Then to the spicy nut-brown ale,
With stories told of many a feat,
How Fairy-Mab the junkets eat;
She was pincht, and pull’d, she said,
And he by friars lanthorn led;
Tells how the drudging Goblin (wet,
To earn his cream-bowl duly set,
When in one nigħt, ere gliinpse of morn,
His shadowy Aail hath thresh'd the corn,
That ten day-labourers could not end,
Then lies him down the lubbar fiend,
And stretch'd out all the chimney's length;
Basks at the fire his hairy strength;
And crop-full out of doors he fings,
Ere the first cock his mattin rings.
Thus done the tales, to bed they creepy.
By whispering winds soon lulld alleep...
Tow'red cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men,
Where throngs of knights and barons bold,
In weeds of peace high triumphs hold,
With store of ladies, whose bright eyes.
Rain influence, and judge the prize
Of wit or arms, while both contend
To win her grace, whom all cominendo.
'There let Hymen oft appear
In faffron robe, with taper clear,
And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask, and antique pageantry,
Such fights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by, haunted stream.
Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Johnson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespear, fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild.
And ever against eating cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse,
Such as the meeting foul may pierce
In notes, with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning,
The melting voice thro' mazes running;
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden foul of Harmony :
That Orpheus' self may heave his head.
From golden slumber on a bed
Of heap'd Elyfian flowers, and hear
Such ftrains as would have won the ear:
Of Pluto, to have quite fet free
His half-regain'd Eurydice.
These delights if thou canst give,
Mirthy, with thee I mean to live..
IL PENSEROSO.
[MILTON.] ENCE vain deluding joys,
The brood of folly without father bred !
How little you befted,
Or fill the fixed mind with all your toys!
Dwell in some idle brain,
And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess,
As thick and numberless
As the gay motes that people the fun-beams,
Or likest hovering dreams,
The fickle pensioners of Morpheus train.
But hail thou Goddess, fage and holy,
Hail divineft Melancholy,
Whose faintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human fight;
And therefore to our weaker view
O'erlaid with black, staid wisdom's hue;
Black, but such as in esteem,
Prince Memnon's sister might befeem,
Or that starr'd Ethiope queen that ftrove
To set her beauty's praise above
The fea-nymphs, and their powers offended :
Yet thou art higher far descended.
Thee bright-hair'd Vesta long of yore
To folitary Saturn bore;
His daughter she (in Saturn's reign
Such mixture was not held a stain)
Oft, in glimmering bowers and glades,
He met her, and in secret shades
(f. woody Ida's inmost grove,
While yet there was no fear of Jove.
Come, pensive nun, devout and pure,
Sober, stedfast, and demure,
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestic train,
And sable stole of cypress lawn,
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.
Come, but keep thy wonted state,
With ev'n step, and musing gait,
And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt foul fitting in thine eyes :
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